Tag Archive: 0illustrations

I’m always drawn to books for teaching children to read.  This one seems apt this week, with its being so hot: Calo et Lili apprennent à lire, a book specially designed for use in the French territories of the Pacific, published in Nouméa (the capital of the Melanesian island of New Caledonia) in 1962. Aside from the illustrations, by […]

Here’s fun: stickmen performing scenes from Shakespeare in 1824.  The artist, Thomas Bedford, was one of Bristol’s earliest lithographic printers (‘possibly the earliest’ according to Twyman, Early Lithographed Books, p. 150); he first appears listed as lithographer in 1823, so this is an early production of his.  The title is from Macbeth, but the other […]

Here are two entertaining and highly imaginative satires, published in 1744 by the German writer Johann Friedrich Vetter, on the demise of France’s reputation during the War of the Austrian Succession: Das merckwürdige Leben, die sonderbare Kranckheit darauf erfolgter Tod und Begräbnuß der Französischen Reputation, welche zu dem allgrösten Leidwesen der Franzosen, mit einem noch niemal also gehaltenen […]

2764 guests, at a cost of £13,188 2s. 1d. (over £600,000 in today’s money), this is Victorian event management at its peak.  Alexander II was visiting his daughter, Maria (styled here ‘Her Imperial and Royal Highness’, always a bone of contention with the British royal family), who had married Queen Victoria’s son, Alfred, at the […]

The week before last I was in New York.  Last week I was back in England, and now it’s off to Paris on Thursday.  This children’s book has similar Anglo-American-French connections.  It’s the first edition in French (1826) of The Adventures of Congo in Search of his Master; an American Tale by the children’s writer Eliza Farrar. […]

As I’m in New York this week, I thought I’d post a suitable book: the first edition in Russian of City Stories told by City Children as they go exploring New York (1928), ‘told from time to time to Miss [Florence E.] Matthews by her seven-year-olds at the Lincoln School’.  The talented young translator, Mikhail […]